There's a new initiative in the wind to upgrade our own Drupal.org site to version 7, and look out, its flying on its own!

Yes, it's been a long time desire ever since Drupal 7 launched, but the momentum and prowess of our amazing community is finally magnetizing into action around the Upgrading Drupal.org to Drupal 7 initiative! It started with a fantastic planning and coding sprint in Portland, OR last month. (see the video) We are now full speed ahead in virtual space and IRC and the issue queues.

It will still take several months of concerted effort by a dedicated team of volunteers to make this transition a successful, safe, and powerful one. Our goal is to launch the new D7 site before the upcoming DrupalCon Munich, and if all goes well and we continue to see an influx of interested helpers (see below on how to help), we'll make that goal!

Our goal is to launch the new D7 site before the upcoming DrupalCon Munich, and if all goes well and we continue to see an influx of interested helpers (see below on how to help), we'll make that goal!

The upgrade to D7 is mostly a 1-to-1 port of existing functionality and we must be careful not to over-engineer, but since Drupal 7 provides so much more in terms of entities, fields, database, and performance improvements, during this upgrade we will gain:

• Underlying plumbing to support additional functionality after the upgrade, such as better Git sandbox and issue queue integration, as well as project ratings, stats, and reviews.
• A re-engineered issue queue and project releases system which will be a more broadly useful solution to sites other than Drupal.org, and with less custom code it will be easier to maintain and contribute to this new system in terms of community collaborative needs.
• A mobile-friendly, HTML5 version of the Drupal.org theme.
• Increased security for user passwords.
• A suite of automated behavoir-driven tests to help ensure that Drupal.org stays functional throughout the upgrade process, and during future improvements.
• Automated performance testing for Drupal.org’s web properties in order to isolate and resolve performance regressions.
• Numerous "under the hood" improvements to Drupal.org's infrastructure to make it more self-sustainable, easier to maintain, and performant.
• Dozens of upstream performance and bug fix contributions to Drupal core and other dependent modules which help the community with their upgrade paths.

And of course as we move ahead to D7 we are being careful not to lose all of the improvements that have been instilled into our site by previous initiatives and the sweat equity of hundreds of expert volunteers. We’ll also be eating our own dog food by making sure that our core and contrib upgrade paths via update.php work as advertised.

Let's not let the momentum die. Will you help us by either volunteering or convincing your company to sponsor-teer you?  There may even be one more all-hands sprint coming up in Portland for any contributors who can make it.

How To Help

Stop by our Drupal.org Office Hours every Monday from 11am - 12pm Pacific (18:00 - 19:00 UTC) in the #drupal-infrastructure IRC channel and ask for ‘Senpai’ or ‘tvn’. You can also follow @drupal_org on Twitter to volunteer your services!